The number shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as churn is a constant in the channel. In reality, though, the number – and problem – is probably much worse as vendor firing isn’t the worse consequence of these issues.

The Enterasys study touches on the core points of contention between vendors and solution providers – business development and predictable outcomes. Forty-three percent of solution providers cite the lack of sales leads provided by vendors as the reason for leaving a channel program. One-third cited channel conflict or over-distributed channels that lead to too much competition for too few sales. And 31 percent cited poor support.

Probably the two most damning statistics from the survey is one in three solution providers saying they cannot define a return on investment from a vendor relationship, and  27 percent saying they’re vendors simply do not understand their business model and do not align their goals with partners.

The concerns cited by solution providers are valid and well-known in the channel. Solution providers do “fire” vendor partners on a regular basis. Conversely, vendors routinely fire or change channel criteria to weed out underperformers.

The real consequences of these problems, though, are probably much worse than the 25 percent attrition rate. Experience shows solution providers don’t so much leave vendor programs as de-emphasis participation in a channel program. They’ll keep a vendor on their line card for the occasional customer who demands a certain brand, but they won’t invest in certifications, channel development or sales activities.

In other words, solution providers will go fallow. And that presents a much bigger problem for vendors and the overall channel.

Consider this: Conventional wisdom says the channel operates on the 80/20 rule, in which 80 percent of channel revenue is driven through 20 percent of the partners. Invert the ratio; that means 20 percent of channel revenue is driven by 80 percent of partners who sell on a transactional or opportunistic basis. Many of those underperformers fall into the “de-emphasized” category.

For vendors, this is a huge problem and translates into huge costs. Even though partners aren’t selling at their full potential, they will demand services and support. They want leads, marketing materials, training and demonstration units. They require management, which means assigning underperformers to channel account managers and distribution. All of this costs money; and the 80 percent of the channel partners represent a huge operational expense without an ROI for the vendor.

Some vendors will look at these numbers and think it better if a partner fires them. If they’re dissatisfied and not performing, best they leave. But solution providers who stay in a channel program consuming resources without support actually punish vendors more by consuming expensive resources. It all adds up to unbalanced expectations on both sides of the equation that dampen total channel performance.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson

The latest release from NetSuite will become the first offering from the cloud ERP vendor to support manufacturing companies.

NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson said the company has long supported business processes for those who use contract manufacturers, but lacked functionality required by those who do manufacturing themselves, such as standard cost lists, work-in-progress controls and routings. But now, the bombastic executive says it’s time to tackle “the last industry that hasn’t moved to the cloud.”

“There’s a whole sea change coming in manufacturing, with things like direct-to-consumer manufacturing and 3D printing driving manufacturing back on-shore,” Nelson said.

Roman Bukary, vice president of manufacturing and distribution at NetSuite, said that at current, the biggest and most complex manufacturing operations are out of the company’s range, but “discreet and even complex manufacturing” is the sweet spot, and the company will expand functionality from there. This follows Netsuite’s common tactic of building its offering for SMB customers, and then building in new functionality for large customers later.

Nelso said the market makes sense because of the inherent complexity of the number of systems manufacturers have to use to run their business, and the fact that all of those disparate systems have to be hooked into ERP. The company has long said it sought to avoid the “hairball” of interconnections between business systems by offering a full suite approach, and because of that complexity, Nelson described the typical manufacturer’s situation as “a hairball on steroids.”

Craig West, vice president of channel sales for NetSuite, said the company’s partners have been “clamoring” for capabilities for manufacturing customers, and that many of those partners have existing customers in manufacturing, but were unable to expand their work with those clients beyond core ERP. West said the company will look to equip current partners with or without existing manufacturing practices or customers, and onboard partners with industry experience but new to NetSuite.

The company announced a partnership with Autodesk to combine NetSuite’s back office systems for manufacturers with Autodesk’s design and product lifecycle management tools. Autodesk’s channel would be one source of new partners for the company, giving those partners the opportunity to get more entrenched with their manufacturing customers. West said he expects to see “a lot of cross-pollination” of the NetSuite and Autodesk channels as a result of the new product, and confirmed that a number of NetSuite partners have been in conversation with Autodesk at SuiteWorld.

Also at SuiteWorld, NetSuite introduced a “Built for NetSuite” program aimed at certifying ISVs’ add-on applications built on the company’s SuiteCloud development platform. The company boasts a developer network of some 300 organizations, with 270 add-ons, known as SuiteApps, available in the market today. To have an app certified as Built for NetSuite, applications have to be submitted for review, and meet the company’s standards for architecture, development, privacy, and security.

“The first step was allowing you to build all these apps, and the second step is making sure these apps built all around the world play well together,” Nelson said.

The Boston, Mass.-based firm upgraded its flagship Insight Enterprise solution with the launch of Insight 3.0, a suite that provides a spate of new tools that include multi-vector vulnerability assessment, asset categorization, threat simulation, penetration testing and advanced security analytics.

It’s a comprehensive solution that represents a springboard for the channel from which to launch new combinations of specialized services and build out portfolios as Big Data trends around security reaches their stride.

The medley of tools are housed in a unified security risk management console that gives solution providers control over the entirety of the vulnerability management lifecycle. And like many intelligence-based vulnerability management solutions, the latest 3.0 release touts a slew of advanced capabilities targeted toward verticals tasked to meet requirements around compliance.

“With today’s constantly-evolving threat landscape, security professionals and business leaders don’t need more security-related data, they need more security intelligence applied to that data,” said Milan Shah, senior vice president of products and engineering at CORE Security. “While existing vulnerability management solutions have delivered what they can, they fall short when it comes to analytics and intelligence.”

That said, Core is touting the addition of predictive intelligence technology as its biggest selling point, which allows channel partners to analyze and contextual the barrage of data and charge top dollar in the process.

Specifically, the 3.0 release is designed to capture copious data to identify an array of vulnerabilities from various sources. To that end, the solution maps security data and correlates it to actionable risk information — an addition that gives partners the ability to aggregate vulnerability and threat information used to identify high-probability risks and threat vectors that lead to attacks against critical assets.

From there partners can prioritize threats and then cultivate strategies for remediation, which in turn enables them to bulk differentiation and and carve out unique high-margin niches in the vulnerability management space.

And by many reports, solution providers would be smart to place their bets in vulnerability management. A recent TechNavio report indicated that the global security and vulnerability management market was set to grow at a CAGR of 12.2 percent between 2011 and 2014, driven by the dearth of compliance regulations.

As previously mentioned by Channelnomics, compliance and GRC markets are on a sharp upward trajectory, thanks in part to the rise of high-profile data breaches and advanced attacks, increasingly stringent regulations, and the rise of cloud technologies that have put an accelerator on GRC markets. And vulnerability management provides a major piece of the GRC puzzle.

That said, partners will likely be able to carve out increasingly profitable niches as the market expands by developing customizable services around an exponential and overwhelming rise of threat data, attributed to spiking Big Data security trends.

Why? Because customers don’t understand it, and have little time to process or analyze it, let alone develop a subsequent remediation plan or resulting security strategy based on the findings.

That’s where the channel can step in, commanding high margins to fill in badly needed security forensic gaps that many customers will increasingly be willing to pay.

As previously contended, security threat intelligence, or Big Data for security, will likely represent major opportunities around almost all areas of security not too far down the road. Among other things, it’s likely that Big Data trends in security will spur the channel to build out portfolios to incorporate a wider array of intelligence based technologies and analytics tools in order to stay competitive.

That will likely give partners the ability to go ever deeper and bulk practices around vulnerability management, and other once-obscure and overlooked niches in security.

NetSuite channel chief Craig West

Cloud-based ERP software vendor NetSuite has been working with solution providers for a decade, but Craig West, the company’s channel chief, says the market is still in the early innings of the cloud game.

West made the comments kicking off the partner general session at the company’s SuiteWorld 2013 conference in San Jose, bringing together some 700 of the company’s channel partners.

“All of you here, you’ve got some investment in the cloud, whether it’s been 10 years, 10 months, or 10 days,” West said. “But the reality is, it is still crazy early in this adoption curve. You may feel like it’s long overdue, but you’re still way ahead.”

But West believes the company, and its partners are at an inflection point. Sharing results of KPMG study on enterprise attitudes towards the cloud, he suggested that while NetSuite, as a cloud-based app, is on the radar of the 42 percent of companies that have already bought into cloud-based applications, there’s a group that’s almost as large that’s set to take its first steps into the cloud over the next 18 months.

“Ten years of doing this has gotten us to 42 percent, so it’s exciting that another 18 months could get us another 35,” West said.

That means that three quarters of organizations have either gone to the cloud, or are seriously considering it, and NetSuite partners report that growing acceptance has changed how they approach their businesses.

“The market has completely turned around, from one where we had to beg just to be there, to one where we’re welcomed to talk about the value of the cloud and the solutions we’re offering,” said Todd Fitzwater, principal of Los Gatos, Calif.-based Demand Solutions Group, a NetSuite partner. “We used to have to spend so much time justifying cloud solutions. But now, when you go to the table, it’s because you’re asked to be there, and if you sit at the table with an on-premise provider, you’re surprised.”

VJ Africa, director of Singapore-based PGE Solutions, was even more succinct, saying that “mentioning cloud used to be the quickest way to be kicked out of a sales meeting” in Asia, but thanks to a view “visionary customers,” that is no longer the case.

NetSuite has also been investing in its channel, as West said the company has upped its partner sales rep headcount by 83 per cent, and introduced the new role of associate channel manager, whose role is to focus on partner service levels. The company has introduced 50 new channel-related marketing campaigns, and launched an RFP Desk to help partners on bigger bids. And soon, West said, the company will provide its InsideView social sharing for ERP software free to all of its solution providers.

The company does not disclose its direct/channel sales mix, but CEO Zach Nelson provided some clues Tuesday, saying that although he does not believe any software company that started out direct will ever reach a 50/50 mix, “we’re getting pretty darned close to 50/50 in terms of new bookings.”

But Nelson reiterated his belief that it’s not the vendor’s job to provide leads to channel partners, saying he firmly believes that “whoever finds the deer, kills the deer and eats the deer.” He said the company has mechanisms to manage channel conflict, but that if all parties are playing smartly, channel conflict is minimized by the sheer nature of the market on which NetSuite is focused. The company likes to say its ERP offerings were designed “for the Fortune Five Million,” although they have grown up into the enterprise space as well.

“When you’ve got five million deer out there, and you’re running into each other on a specific hunt, someone’s doing something wrong,” Nelson said, continuing his hunting analogy.

David Scott, SVP and GM, HP Storage

Hewlett-Packard Co. this week is taking aim at the growing storage needs of cash-strapped smaller businesses with a new SMB-focused storage system and an updated channel program to help resellers get the wares into the hands of their clients.

New to the Palo Alto, Calif., vendor’s lineup is the MSA 2040 Storage four-port 8/16GB Fiber Channel array that delivers affordable SSD performance up to 288TB in a simple to deploy and easy to manage system. The MSA 2040 boasts an updated controller with 4GB cache per controller, built-in setup and management tools, and comes standard with 64 Snapshots and Volume Copy enabled for increased data protection and support for replication with optional Remote Snap software.

The flexible enclosure allows solution providers to select large or small form factor enterprise-class SAS or SAS Midline SSDs to best suit the client’s application, performance, and budget requirements. An integrated “wear gauge” lets end user improve application performance and reduce operating costs by reducing the system’s overall footprint and power consumption.

The MSA 2040 is compatible with a number of operating systems including: Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Server 2012, Windows 2008, Windows Hyper-V; HP-UX; Red Hat Linux; SUSE Linux; and VMware ESXi 5.x.

More importantly to partner, HP is announcing the MSA 2040 concurrent with the launch of a new end-to-end storage program with solution guides and reference architectures for resellers targeting SMB customers. The addition to the HP Just Right IT program, dubbed HP Simply StoreIT, includes tools, resources and incentives to help channel partners accelerate time to revenue with HP storage solutions, according to HP officials. Simply StoreIT tools include quote and configuration templates, cobranded lead-generation assets, training and materials designed to increase sales opportunities.

David Scott, senior vice president and general manager in HP’s Storage Division, said the entire package of product, services and partner enablement will help solution providers address specific challenges in critical areas of virtualization, backup and data protection, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server, and file consolidation.

“Virtualization and other emerging workloads threaten to drown SMBs in a sea of complexities that hinder, rather than support, growth,” said Scott “Simply StoreIT allows our partners to serve their small and midsized customers who are stressed for time, budget and resources to support a growing business, with a stress-free storage solution.”

The Simply StoreIT Program is available to partners worldwide now. Dual-controller MSA 2040 configurations will be available on July 4 and start at at $11,470 which includes custom enhancements of HP StoreEasy Storage for storing, managing and protecting unstructured data for thousands of concurrent users along with persistent file and application availability.

ERP Guru president Martin McNicoll

Montreal-based NetSuite solution provider ERP Guru has a history of making acquisitions – the company’s aggressive acquisitions strategy has seen it buy into the Chicago market, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh by way of purchasing its fellow NetSuite partners.

But president Martin McNicoll said he wasn’t looking to expand within Canada this year. That is, until NetStra Inc., a Toronto-based NetSuite partner, and its president Mark Walker, got in touch.

“We were opportunistic on this one,” he said. “We’re still looking to do one more acquisition in the U.S. this year, but we weren’t looking to expand in Canada. Toronto was a surprise for us.”

It may not have been in the long-term plans, but the NetStra purchase resembles the company’s other purchases. In each case, ERP Guru bought into a market by acquiring a smaller fellow NetSuite partner with whom it had personal and business connections.

But unlike its deals to move into Chicago and St. Louis, the company has existing customers in the Toronto area, so it’s not starting from zero. Walker will head up the company’s Toronto presence, which is moving into a new location in the downtown core. “He’s a great addition for us, who can write SuiteScript himself, but can sell it too, explain everything to the business people,” McNicoll said.

McNicoll said the company still doesn’t have plans to expand within Canada via acquisition, but clearly the company may eye organic growth in Western Canada. The solution provider already has customers in both Alberta and British Columbia, but McNicoll said he’s been surprised by the lack of NetSuite partners in Western Canada. “The opportunities are there, but we haven’t run into a big partner there,” he said.

But the fact that there’s demand in Western Canada may mean it’s likely to head there – McNicoll said the company’s model is to look at where there’s opportunity, and then build the business in location to take advantage of that opportunity. It is a bit of business irony that although the company is all about cloud-based software that’s run centrally, McNicoll feels it’s vitally important to have local “boots on the ground” to support customers.

“When you’re positioning yourself as a trusted advisor, it’s so important to have that local presence,” he said.

The solution provider has doubled its headcount – now at 65 – over the last year. McNicoll said the company has staffed up in Montreal, and will now prioritize ramping up its Manchester, NH location (an organic growth expedition) this year, and then Toronto. To support that growth, it’s developing what McNicoll calls “ERP Guru Accademy” at its Montreal headquarters, a new training facility where staff from satellite locations a few times a year for training, and to make sure the company’s culture stays consistent.

“Culture is so important – it’s the number one reason acquisitions fail,” McNicoll said.

At this week’s NetSuite SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., ERP Guru has a significant presence. Coming off a year when it was the cloud-based ERP vendor’s worldwide partner of the year, the company has a substantial booth, and McNicoll had a seat on a high-profile panel during the partner general session Monday. McNicoll’s message to his fellow partners: It’s time to get together and form a network of solution providers to collectively go after the market.

To propel its ambitions, the Moscow-based endpoint security firm appointed industry vet William Cunningham as Kaspersky Lab vice president, enterprise sales North America.

Cunningham comes on board Kaspersky Lab after serving as vice president of sales at online identity firm WhiteSky, a role in which he increased sales and expanded monetization efforts around the company’s product lines, while also securing a few new major client wins for the firm’s products.

Prior to his position at WhiteSky, Cunningham served as the vice president of sales and business development at online backup firm Carbonite Inc., a position in which he bulked up channel leadership acumen by implementing lead generation, managing a direct sales force and establishing a reseller channel program, among other things.

Now in his new role, Cunningham will be tasked to oversee and direct the company’s enterprise field sales organization in North America, a job which includes managing all field sales activity for the region’s customers.

“Bill has years of relevant experience—both in sales leadership and in working with the enterprise—and there is no better time for us to tap into his insights and knowhow as we continue to innovate new information security technologies for large organizations,” said Chris Doggett, senior vice president of corporate sales. “Those organizations are seeking solutions in new areas such as virtualized environments and industrial control systems, as well as seeking real-time intelligence, attack alerting and highly effective response capabilities.  We’re confident that under Bill’s leadership that we’ll increasingly demonstrate to enterprises that not only is Kaspersky at the forefront of business information security technology, but that we offer the best possible protection and solutions that they won’t find elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, Cunningham’s appointment fills in some crucial leadership gaps opened during a four-year period of executive musical chairs at the company. Cunningham, who will report to Doggett, fills an open gap in North American enterprise and channel sales. At the end of last year, Doggett stepped up from his position as head of North American channel sales to lead corporate sales at Kaspersky Lab, a position that was vacated by the October 2012 departure of Nancy Reynolds, who had served in that role since January 2010.

As previously mentioned by Channelnomics, channel chief positions at the security firm have revolved with surprising regularity over the last four years. Since June of 2009, channel leadership roles have been held – and left — by John Eddy, Kristen Capone, Gary Abad and finally Doggett.

While it’s unclear if the frequent executive turnover has significantly stymied the firm from moving forward in its enterprise and expanded channel ambitions, it likely doesn’t help.

And these days Kaspersky Lab has little room to get comfortable. The firm has stated that its plans to make a bigger strides into the enterprise, in part driven by the January release of its Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Business, which trumpets systems management, data encryption, application control and other features desirable to large market verticals.

The Russia-based company is also attempting to make more concerted forays into virtualization and mobile device management, a necessity in order to stay relevant in upstream markets.

Even still, the firm faces nearest competitors Sophos Ltd. and Trend Micro Inc., which have made headway in both mobile and cloud arenas, as well as firms such as FireEye Inc. and others that are edging into endpoint security market with advanced threat prowess.

The fact that Kaspersky Lab has major channel leadership roles covered is likely a baseline requirement in order to move forward with its ambitions in any meaningful way.

Avnet Mobile Data Center for VSPEX

Distributor Avnet Technology Solutions is taking advantage of changes to EMC’s services authorizations for distributors to introduce a fully integrated mobile data center based on the storage company’s VSPEX reference architecture.

VSPEX is EMC’s prescribed infrastructure family for combining its storage gear with networking and server hardware and operating system and application software from a variety of vendors. It covers reference architectures for 100, 250, and 500 virtual machine configurations running a wide array of software, including Microsoft, Citrix, and VMware software.

In Avnet’s case, the Mobile Data Center for EMC VSPEX offered a ruggedized converged infrastructure of storage, server, and networking, all in a container that the distributor says can be used safely in a variety of un-data center-friendly environments, including outside in the desert.

“As long as you’ve got power, it’s going to work,” said Greg Peterson, vice president and general manager of Avnet’s EMC Solutions group. The distributor particularly sees opportunity for the offering in disaster situations, and military applications.

Late last year, EMC introduced a certification for distributors to deliver integration services around VSPEX-configured hardware, but the storage giant quietly updated that authorization this month to include permission to do complete software configuration. That change allows Avnet to offer the Mobile Data Center as configured as a solution provider may want it.

“It means we can load the OS, load the LUNs, load the hypervisor, the applications, and deliver the whole converged infrastructure,” said John Tonthat, business director for Avnet’s EMC group.

The distributor pre-integrates the hardware and software for the Mobile Data Center in its Chandler, Ariz. technical facility. Typically, it says it can deliver the offering within 30 days of an order being received, although Peterson said that in cases of disaster, it can get that down to a number of days, rather than weeks.

Avnet will be promoting it as an opportunity to a variety of its partners with strong virtualization practices and certifications for EMC’s midrange products. In order to sell and configure a solution based on VSPEX, partners have to have certifications for all the component vendors, as well as some specific training and certification on the VPSEX initiative.

As much as the distributor sees applications for its new solution, Tonthat said the introduction of the Mobile Data Center is just as much about raising awareness around VSPEX and what a solution provider – or distributor – can do with the reference architecture.

“The unit we built is a design exercise to capture our partners’ imaginations about the different use cases for private cloud,” he said. “There are so many applications for VSPEX – look at the rest of the Microsoft app stack, look at VDI. We’re working on some very cool roadmaps for products that are aligned with VSPEX roadmap, using our line card and our capabilities.”

And while it will be developing new packaged offerings based on VSPEX, Peterson said the distributor is looking to solution providers for new frontiers for the current Mobile Data Center package.

“We see opportunities, but now we’re looking for what partners will find to do with it, the novel uses they’ll find in the market.

Westcon CTO Bill Hurley

Westcon Group is offering its partners a new tool to manage customers Bring Your Own Device initiatives, offering a new package called BYODshield that combines two vendors’ offerings with some custom code and is packaged for partners to sell as a monthly service to customers.

BYODShield aims to offer solution providers a single SKU, available as a service, to handle network access management and security, mobile application management, and mobile device management. The package brings together network security and virtual appliance delivery from BlueCat, and MDM capabilities from Fiberlink’s MaaS360 offering.

The solution is cloud-based, and can be offered by solution providers as a white-label offering – Westcon CTO Bill Hurley is adamant that the company “has no interest in the name Westcon Group going through to the end user.” Westcon casts a wide net for BYODshield. As it’s cloud-based, Hurley said the distributor knows it can scale to “tens of thousands of users,” although he said the biggest opportunity for channel partners is likely to be with midsize organizations that are facing significant management complexity with employee-owned mobile devices.

The BYODshield bundle also handles device self-registration and IP Address management, measures which aim to help customers be ready for the deluge of additional IP addresses and inbound requests that BYOD strategies can bring to a company’s network. BYOD is a key challenge for many organizations, as it has rapidly become a concept that needs to be supported, whether or not IT would like to do so. Any many solution providers have fashioned their own repeatable solutions around the initiative, combining any of a number of MDM offerings with other functionality for a BYOD solution for customers. While it may make a case for BYODshield with these types of solution providers, it appears its main market will be solution providers who’ve yet to build a specific practice around BYOD, offering them a pre-configured service that will be much quicker to bring to market than anything speced out by the solution provider.

The distributor, like many of its peers, is no stranger to bringing together pre-integrated solutions from multiple vendors’ technologies. But what makes it unique, Hurley said, is that for the first time, the distributor had “code specifically written based on Westcon’s requirements” for BYODshield. That code gets the two products working together seamlessly, and allows Westcon and its resellers to offer it on a subscription basis.

“We believe distribution is going to bring more and more of these multi-vendor solutions together, wrapped with services so the reseller can easily bring it to market,” Hurley said. “We think it’s unique, and we think it’s an example of one of the future roles distribution plays in the channel.”

And while many parties in the IT supply chain will talk about “eating their own dog food” – using their own technology in their business, BYODshield is more a case of Westcon liking its own dog food so much it decided to market it. The solution was originally developed by Hurley and his team as a way to address the distributor’s own growing challenge with the BYOD revolution among its user base.

Today is the deadline for shareholders to propose alternative slates for the company’s board of directors. Icahn says the current board is giving the company away if it accepts CEO Michael Dell’s offer to buy the company and take it off the stock market for $13.65 per share. Icahn’s plan: Defeat Michael Dell’s offer, install a new board of directors and replace the company’s management.

“There’s going to be a vote on whether or not they want to accept the Dell offer. Southeastern and I will vote against that offer. We have 14 percent. We are very hopeful we will get that defeated. Once they defeat that, they can cover for our slate. We will take the company over and immediately give them $12 if they wish. They still will own Dell stock. Dell stock is worth much more than $1.65,″ Icahn told Bloomberg Television in an extensive interview Friday.

In February, Michael Dell – the company’s founder – announced plans to take the company private as part of a broader plan to reoriented the company around software, cloud computing and enterprise services. As a private company, Dell (the company) would have far greater latitude in executing development plans without reacting to Wall Street performance demands.

The Dell board is currently considering three plans – the Icahn offer that would give shareholders’ cash and retain their stock, the Dell deal proffered with private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, and a competing bid by Blackstone Group. All the deals are valued between $22 and $25 billion; the structure and outcomes are what’s different.

A large part of Icahn’s motivation is his perception that Dell is running away its PC business, which has steadily declined with the rest of the market. Dell, once the world’s largest PC manufacturer, has slipped behind Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo in recent years and continues to fade. Dell acquired a series of companies, including Equal Logic, SonicWall, Wyse Technologies and Compellent – to transform its business to a more enterprise focus. But those transformation efforts are still works in progress.

Icahn doesn’t dispute the PC market is declining, but believes there’s enough life left to warrant maintaining and expanding the Dell share of the business. He even suggested that Dell could acquire another PC company or the investor group could buy a company, and then merge Dell with the other assets. The top of the list: HP.

“The PC business is going downhill. In the case of Dell, we believe it will take a long time for it to go downhill. We believe the PC business is still extremely attractive for the short-term because it’s necessary. PC’s are not going way. Microsoft depends on Dells and Hewlett-Packards. We might acquire somebody in the business like Hewlett-Packard,” Icahn said.

Ironically, a deal with HP could be an option. The company was just slapped with a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over the handling of the disposition of WebOS and its 2011 ill-fated tablet launch, the botched acquisition of big data software vendor Autonomy and former CEO Leo Apotheker signaling a potential sale of the $40 billion PC business. Within two days of those announcements in August 2011, HP stock value lost $16 billion.

Under current CEO Meg Whitman, HP has stabilized the company, but still has a long way to go for full recovery. Whitman has said PCs will remain a part of the HP portfolio. However, she’s also said that HP could consider selling off underperforming divisions and assets.

“There is a shot down the road that we could – with the PC Business – merge with Hewlett-Packard,” Icahn said.

If Icahn succeeds in his coup, it could mean the end of an era with the almost-certain ouster of Michael Dell from the CEO post and, most likely, the company. Even though Dell has tried reversing the company’s sales and revenue declines by investing in new markets and technologies, Icahn said he doesn’t think the founder has done a good enough job.

“I have nothing against Michael Dell. I have respect for him. I laughingly say that I respect the way he has gotten the board to give him this bargain. I’ve never met him. I think he’s a smart guy, but he would not be the one to run this company,” Icahn said.

The implications for Dell’s sprawling channel are significant. While Dell has done a tremendous job of converting itself from a volume-based direct sales company to a channel-centric vendor with midmarket and enterprise products, its partner community awaits the outcome of this ownership battle. Most partners agree with Dell’s decision to go private, but the uncertainty of ownership and consequent changes if current management is ousted could cause disruptions in channel programs and operations.

The consequences for the broader channel could be far more severe if Icahn gains control of Dell and looks to merge with another vendor or acquire another PC business, has he suggested. A mega-PC merger would reorient practically the entire channel, causing some solution providers to lose their long-earned status and forced to change their operating relationship with the emerging company.

The factor weighing in Dell’s partners is the debt that each of the potential acquirers will have to take in any takeover deal. Icahn’s proposal would require his group to borrow as much as $5.5 billion. The Michael Dell group is borrowing $15 billion to $17 billion. With that much red ink on the books, accelerating sales and revenue will be a top priority – and that means no channel disruptions.

Departing Shoretel CEO Peter Blackmore

The executive rumblings that shook up channel leadership at unified communications stalwart ShoreTel Inc. are apparently reverberating all the way to the corner office.

The Sunnyvale, Calif. vendor announced today that CEO Peter Blackmore will retire as soon as a successor can be found. Blackmore, a sales leadership veteran with stints at Unisys Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp., took the chief executive job at ShoreTel in December 2010.

No reason was given for Blackmore’s departure in a brief official statement announcing the change.

“I am confident that the company is well-positioned in both the cloud and premise unified communications market,” Blackmore said in the statement. “With recent changes to our organizational and cost structure, we can now scale with a model positioned for profitability, enhancing our objective of delivering improved shareholder value.”

ShoreTel board chairman Chuck Kissner said he was grateful for Blackmore’s decision to “continue in his role during this transition period.”

“We intend to keep moving full speed ahead with our near-term plans to launch new innovative products and services and to continue to execute on our combined premise and cloud strategy,” Kissner added.

ShoreTel officials said a search for a new CEO is underway.

The CEO shakeup comes just weeks after ShoreTel lost its channel chief, Joe Vitalone, to an arch competitor. After a surprise exit from ShoreTel, Vitalone was introduced in March as the new executive vice president of sales for the Americas at Canadian UC specialist Mitel Networks Corp. in Kanata , Ontario.

ShoreTel is about a year into a significant channel revamp aimed at better positioning the vendor against a growing number of UC competitors, particularly in the cloud.

To that end, Sophos Ltd. expanded endpoint protection in the latest version of its unified threat management device, broadened its wireless coverage and bulked VPN performance to cater to larger enterprise customers.

But the Boston, Mass.-based security firm is likely hoping to leverage its acumen in both networking and endpoint security to stay competitive and carve out a more profitable niche in an increasingly tough networking security market. The new UTM solution, dubbed UTM Connected, incorporates what Sophos calls Web in Endpoint functionality, a feature which amps up standard feature sets typically included in network security appliances.

Here’s the idea, according to Sophos: Most UTM devices come packaged with a medley of standard security features loaded onto a single appliance. Where Sophos hopes to differentiate is by making those technologies speak to each other, allowing resulting solutions to be more effectively mix-and-matched to better tackle security problems.

No doubt, the solution’s biggest selling point is that it incorporates a blend of gateway, endpoint and cloud – a combination that Sophos hopes will take standard networking features, as well as channel value, up a few notches. Among other things, Sophos touts that the combination gives channel partners and IT administrators both full Web protection and control over mobile and remote endpoints outside the corporate network, as well as the ability to update policies and report accessed data in real time for an increasingly remote workforce.

And one way Sophos is hoping to gain a competitive edge is by better catering to the dearth of mobile and remote workers. To that end, the endpoint and networking security firm also bolstered its solution with new capabilities that extend wireless network reach. Improvements also include a VPN that’s touted as faster and more secure while also better supporting load balancing and traffic failover between IPsec VPN tunnels.

“Customers and partners shape our UTM roadmap, ensuring that we deliver innovative technology that is practical to use in a business environment,” said Chris Kraft, vice president, product management, Sophos. “Web in Endpoint is a great example of solving a complex problem with a simple solution. Because we have proven endpoint protection and secure web gateway expertise, we are uniquely positioned to help IT administrators secure their roaming workforces – and having a single solution like this makes life easier for our channel partners to deploy security too.”

If anything, Sophos is positioning the its latest UTM appliance as an attractive network security alternative by targeting the groundswell of remote and traveling workers. And the addition of endpoint security is one that could give the firm and its partners a strong leg up when attempting to gain territory in an incredibly tight network security market.

It’s an angle Sophos has been playing for a while. The firm added endpoint management to its UTM offering last year in an attempt to yield a stronger and more noticeable differentiator that would effectively position it against its competition.

Days later, Sophos fully integrated its Astaro partner program, while later that year it launched a UTM appliance and software package dedicated solely to the SMB.

No doubt, Sophos is letting the world know it intends to stay the course on its network security commitments following its 2011 acquisition of UTM firm Astaro – and with good reason. According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, the UTM market is slated for around 15 percent growth and projected to grow to nearly $4 billion by 2015.

And Sophos is clearly leveraging its endpoint prowess in a way that few, if any, have done before. Even still, it now has to find a way to remain relevant and competitive in a tightening UTM race, especially against established market leaders such as Fortinet Inc., Sourcefire Inc., Palo Alto Networks Inc. and other industry peers. And that might be easier said than done.

The Insight report, released earlier this week, pegs the 2013 global managed services market at $152 billion. In the U.S., businesses ranging from enterprise to SMB will spend $34 billion managed IT and telephony services. Over the next four years, managed services spending will increase 11.6 percent annually. In the U.S., the market will balloon to $51 billion.

“A large percentage of business activity now depends on the Internet for everything from electronic commerce to intranet applications to customer service. These data applications are driving exponential traffic growth onto corporate networks, while increasing their complexity,” said Fran Caulfield, Research Director for Insight Research. “Managed Services allow corporations to handle this growth, while outsourcing the most complicated elements to the skilled service provider.”

The Insight study covers everything from basic voice and data transport services to managed networks and endpoints to security services – essentially the full spectrum of managed service offerings.

Noteworthy is the growth of managed services among service providers – the traditional providers of either transport or hosted services. As cloud computing matures, more services providers are offering more than just end-to-end connectivity and virtual services, but managed services over the assets, applications and services. Insight believes this expansion of the service provider portfolio will contribute greatly to the managed services market expansion.

Managed services has transformed the channel over the last decade, providing value-added resellers and integrators built on one-time product sales and term professional services contracts with a persistent and predictable revenue stream. It’s also helped solution providers scale their capacity, as managed services replaces the traditional on-site support paradigm with a one-to-many automated administration and support model.

The 2112 Group’s recent Channel Profitability report found managed services are the most lucrative offering of the major channel business models. Managed services, according to 2112, generates between 40 and 60 percent gross profits for providers. By comparison, hardware margins are under 10 percent and software sales are under 20 percent and falling.

The evolution of services to include service and cloud providers is also transforming the managed services landscape. Vendors are increasingly looking at all service providers – regardless of their level and capacity – as potential managed service providers, as they see the need for more than just service delivery; services need support and automated support is more lucrative and less expensive.

While Insight’s managed services report is optimistic, there is a chance that the estimate is actually low. As more cloud services fold into the managed services category, and more vendors and solution providers automate applications, infrastructure and back office delivery, the managed services market could swell even higher by the end of the decade.

The report is good news for solution and managed service providers who offer automated and managed systems. However, the continued expansion of this market will likely put pressure on the already battered hardware and software resell market.

With that in mind, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based security company released its network intrusion prevention (IPS) system, McAfee Network Security Platform NS-series.

The solution is a collaborative effort between parent company Intel and its security subsidiary – in fact the first IPS hardware platform based on Intel technology – and more compact than its predecessors.

That said, the solution is relegated to the McAfee channel –as opposed to Intel’s — despite its origins as a joint effort between the two organizations, possibly limiting cross-sell opportunities between the two channels.

But to its own channel partners, McAfee is illuminating power and performance, billing the solution as “bigger and badder, with more things than the one before it,” Nat Smith, McAfee senior product marketing manager, told Channelnomics.

To that end, the NS series touts a 40 Gbps throughput, which Smith said remains consistent, even when turning on all additional functionality during throughput tests. The appliance line also features throughputs of 20 Gbps and 10 Gbps.

Additionally, the network security platform features advanced threat capabilities – an increasing necessity to stay competitive – with the ability to analyze and contextualize threat data in order for customers to make more accurate decisions regarding their security posture.

“IPS is not a game of just having signatures match up to threats,” Smith said. “We have to do things a little bit differently. We have to actually look at behaviors and contextualize several others pieces in the puzzle.”

But its biggest selling point hands down is its performance. The emphasis on power and performance in turn enables McAfee to make a strong showing in large enterprise and high traffic data center environments, as well as service and cloud providers, among other segments. It’s a focus that will ultimately ease the way for its channel to break new ground with larger customers, while creating higher margin opportunities and further establishing McAfee’s credibility in network security arenas.

And perhaps McAfee has to prove itself a little. While the security firm has a strong and viable network security portfolio, Smith said that historically its offerings were likely dwarfed by its reputation and prowess around endpoint security.

But McAfee is hoping to change that. The biggest reason is that certain areas of network security are outpacing endpoint security – and McAfee doesn’t want to miss out.

“There’s a little bit of timing and opportunity,” Smith said. “Traditionally, endpoint is still growing, but not growing as fast as parts of the security industry. It’s much easier to sell product in an areas where things seems to be growing a little bit faster.”

McAfee wouldn’t be remiss to invest further in this area. A TechNavio report indicated that the Global Intrusion Prevention System market was slated to grow at a CAGR of 16.2 percent between 2011 and 2015, driven by a groundswell of regulatory requirements, among other things.

Subsequently, McAfee has stepped up its game. Most notably, the firm plunked down $389 million for next-generation firewall firm Stonesoft, which fills in gaps in McAfee’s network security portfolio that will likely give it more leverage when going up against major industry players Palo Alto Networks Inc., Sourcefire Inc., and Fortinet, Inc.

Last year, McAfee expanded its reach into the firewall management arena – likely set for a growth spike – by infusing Firemon’s Security Manager into its own firewall solution.

And McAfee is also breaking new ground in other areas of network security, namely Security Information and Event Management, kicked off with the acquisition of SIEM firm NitroSecurity in late 2011, but extended with intelligent threat identification technologies into its flagship ePolicy Orchestrator, among other things.

McAfee’s latest network security push takes the firm farther along in its ambition to onboard  “new products in hot and fast growing areas,” Smith said.

“It’s learning a new technology instead of doing business with another vendor,” he said. “We’re a channel driven company and that benefits our partners. That’s how we make our money.”

Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei

The latest move by China-based Huawei to remediate its image as a security threat to governments and enterprises comes straight from the top. Founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei told reporters at a press conference in New Zealand that Huawei is not connected to cyberespionage, nor does it represent a security threat to customers.

“Huawei has no connection to the cybersecurity issues the U.S. has encountered in the past, current and future,” said Ren, according to Reuters.

While several U.S.- and China-based Huawei officers have made similar assertions in the last six months, Ren’s statement is the strongest and highest-level rejection of accusations that Huawei is more of an instrument of China’s People’s Liberation Army that a free enterprise interested in fair competition with the likes of Cisco Systems Inc., Avaya Inc. and Alcatel-Lucent.

Since October 2012, when a U.S. Congressional report labeled the company a national and economic security threat to the United States, Huawei has been buffered by allegations that it is untrustworthy. The U.S. government and competitors actively tell partners and customers they should not buy Huawei products because they could be used to leak information to China’s military and government.

This tainted image likely caused Huawei last month to withdraw from the U.S. carrier market. While the company is moving toward become a global $100 billion company by expanding channels in North America, Europe and Latin America, executive vice president Eric Xu last month said Huawei is no longer interested in the U.S. market, at least for carriers.

Later, the company clarified that it remains interested and optimistic about its prospects for growing market share in enterprise networking in the U.S.

Earlier this week, Huawei launched ICT Nation, a collaborative community of vendors, solution providers and CIOs to advance understanding and best practices of infrastructure development in the cloud computing era. The announcement coincides with new products that facilitate switching in virtualized and cloud environments.

“It will become very clear to those with open minds our commitment to this community,” said COO Jane Li said, referring to the channel and the U.S. market.

In two weeks, Huawei will host North America partners at its annual channel summit in California. While the agenda is more focused on technology, products and go-to-market strategy, the expectation is that trustworthiness and reputation will factor into the discussions.

A survey by The 2112 Group in October 2012 found more than two-thirds of U.S. partners are apprehensive about working with companies labeled as security threats by the government. However, the same ratio of solution providers say competition from foreign companies is good for the U.S. economy and stimulates innovation among domestic vendors.

Bill Gates

Despite rampant software piracy abroad, and withering competition and market churn at home, Bill Gates remains bullish on the technology industry and, in particular, Microsoft Corp.’s tablet and operating system efforts.

The former-Microsoft-chairman-turned-billionaire-philanthropist has one more message for those shopping online for a Surface tablet (or anything else for that matter): You need to pay your sales taxes.

In a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s morning Squawk Box program this week, Gates sat alongside friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffet and talked about Microsoft’s changing fortunes in the post-PC era. Gates poked at rival Apple Inc. and said he thinks the company he founded remains well-positioned to capture tablet market share as consumers look to do more routine business tasks on the devices.

“It’s going to be harder and harder to distinguish products, whether they are tablets or PCs,” Gates told CNBC co-anchor Becky Quick. “With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain share in a market that has been dominated by the iPad-type device. A lot of those users are frustrated. They can’t type. They can’t create documents. They don’t have Office there. We’re providing them with something with the benefits they’ve seen that have made [tablets] a big category but without giving up what they expect in a PC.”

Gates says he doesn’t put much stock in comments that Microsoft is being outgunned by competitors in the market or that traditional technology vendors are on the ropes.

“With tech companies, whoever is the leader is always questioned. They say, ‘Is this the end of them?’” Gates said. “We’ve got some amazingly strong companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and companies coming up like Amazon, Facebook, and Samsung. If you do deep software both on the client and deep services, if you have things unique for businesses the software business is an amazing business to be in both in terms of growth and profitability.”

That’s not to say the industry is without its challenges, however. For a prime example, look east, where Gates said rampant software piracy has made China’s “uniquely high piracy market” a “disaster” for western technology firms.

“We have piracy in places in China that we don’t in most of the world … in government institutions, state owned enterprises and large businesses,” Gates said, adding that Microsoft estimates it gets paid for roughly one over every 10 instances of its products in use in the communist Asian nation.

“China has been a disaster,” Gates said. “It is improving, but fairly slowly. There’s a constant dialog with the companies and the government there as to how to get compliance rates up.”

On the matter of taxes, Gates said the Senate’s passage earlier this week of a bipartisan bill to require the collection of sales and local taxes by online retailers was the right decision.

“The bill that asks them to collect these taxes makes a lot of sense,” said Gates. “It’s very unfair to the person who has a physical store. Not only do they have those expenses, but that the other person isn’t collecting sales tax.

“[The bill] is a good thing for state budgets. It’s a good thing for fairness in terms of the competitive framework.”

But in light of Dell’s years long reincarnation that retooled its focus on software, services and security, among other things, the Round Rock, Tex.-based company is now taking the networking firm and its industry peers head on.

To put it on that path, Dell SonicWall launched its Network Security Appliance (NSA) Series next-generation firewalls (NGFW), a debut aimed squarely at the mid-market and above.

And to gain more territory upstream, Dell is touting a SonicWall appliance fully equipped with performance and advanced threat capabilities. Among other things, the new offering features 10 Gbe connectivity and a scalable, multi-core hardware architecture, along with a low latency deep packet inspection engine, while combining both firewall and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS).

Perhaps not surprisingly, Dell is trumpeting a slew of advanced features — including 10 GbE SFP interfaces, high availability failover, and high performance SSL decryption – which it hopes will further hone in on medium-sized organizations with functionality usually reserved for enterprise grade network security appliances.

“We used the architecture found in our flagship SuperMassive Next-Gen Firewall line developed for the most demanding carriers and enterprises,” said Patrick Sweeney, Dell executive director, product management. “This new NSA Series provides medium-sized business customers with the same high level of security, control, and performance available to the enterprise, in a solution that also offers our acclaimed ease of use and high value.  We think these products are game-changers as we take on Cisco in the critical mid-market.”

Meanwhile, Dell’s latest SonicWall release represents the next step in a journey that has been underway since the firm acquired the unified threat management firm in the spring of last year.

And safe to say, Dell has been grooming its SonicWall acquisition – as well as its associated channel — for an upmarket entrance. Last September, the hardware turned software and services firm revved advanced certifications around its SonicWall portfolio.

Later that year, Dell revamped its SonicWall Live Demo site with iOS and Android compatibility, while expanding global reach and traffic capacity.

And kicking off 2013, Dell embarked on a concerted campaign to entice more of its traditional resellers into the SonicWall fold – even those who had yet to build out a viable security business.

Now, after six months of laying the foundation, Dell is ready to spar with the network security industry’s leading players. That said, the firm has to find a way to remain credible in a tight and increasingly saturated next-generation firewall market. A Market Info Group report projected that the enterprise firewall market will grow at steady 11.1 percent CAGR to reach $34.7 billion between 2012 and 2018.

But the network security appliance market is tightening. Data from IDC indicates that while the security appliance market is still growing, its decelerating. Factory revenue grew in the third quarter of 2012 at a CAGR of 5.7 percent, down from 6.6 percent during  the prior quarter.

In addition to established NGFW players such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Palo Alto Networks Inc., Dell is up against UTM players such as Fortinet Inc.  and Sourcefire Inc.that are eyeing the mid-market and enterprise with next generation firewall releases.

Where Dell is hoping to make a dent is by aiming for the mid-market and enterprise remote offices – a space that demands heightened performance and threat capabilities but still suffers from lack of budget and staff not unlike their SMB counterparts.

But it’s also a market still largely undefined and typically underserved — and in many ways wide open — which might give Dell the necessary opening it needs to carve out its own niche.

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz

Pivotal, the big data spin-off of both EMC and VMware, will build its own channel program, targeted primarily at enterprise partners, the company’s CEO said Tuesday at EMC World.

“When you’re building a platform, you’re interested in people who can add value on top of or underneath that platform,” said Paul Maritz. “We see interest from high-end service providers, to systems integrators, to ISVs. We’re an enterprise company, and we’ll be following channels that lead to the enterprise.”

Given the company’s focus on big data and fast data challenges – the Pivotal One platform is intended to be an “operating system” for cloud-based applications – Maritz said he didn’t see much opportunity with the SMB-focused VAR channel, but did say that ultimately, service providers are likely to build on top of Pivotal’s technologies to extend its reach further down-market.

Pivotal is slated to launch its Pivotal One platform by the end of this year, and in response to a partner question at EMC’s Global Partner Summit, held here in concert with EMC World, EMC chief Joe Tucci suggested that a formal partner program from Pivotal will have to wait until after the platform is out the door.

Maritz touched on this chicken-and-egg issue for his company, saying that there a lot of enterprises that would benefit from the kinds of applications the platform would enable. But before there’s time to further develop those conversations, there is, Maritz says, “a small matter of execution.”

“We’ve got to deliver the actual platform,” he said.

While Pivotal’s plans may not include the VAR partner, many of those partners already sell pieces and parts of the Pivotal platform – for example, the Greenplum database from EMC that has been rolled into Pivotal. The good news, Maritz said, is that the components that have been brought into Pivotal will continue to be offered, and developed, as stand-alone items, as well as rolled into the overall cloud platform.

Perhaps the biggest channel opportunity around Pivotal may be around application development. The company is predicated on the idea that enterprises need to build out their next-generation applications in a way similar to the big Internet companies – the Facebooks and Googles of the world – for scaleout and handling large volumes of data order short periods of time. Maritz said one of the biggest questions he faces is where the apps for his new platform will come from. In part, it will depend on enterprise buy-in, and that’s already started happening. General Electric, for example, bought ten percent of the new company because it intends to write a new generation of applications based on the soon-to-be-realized capability of most everything it sells, from jet engines to toasters, will be capable of “reporting home” via the Internet. This, of course, turns the current deluge of Big Data into the wildest rainstorm ever seen. Maritz says that airline customers tell him that if they were to capture every bit of data generated by a Boeing 777 on a single trans-Atlantic flight, it would be in the order of 8 TB of data. And all of that data would have value for the airlines as well as the manufacturers of aircraft and jet engines, among other interested parties.

“There are so many examples of applications across a variety of industries,” Maritz said.

To some degree, Pivotal will be looking to provide those apps itself. Maritz notes that he has 250 people in his Pivotal Labs division building examples of these types of next-generation applications, which are used to test the performance of the upcoming Pivotal One platform. And presumably, those people and the experience they develop in building those apps and the platform to run them will be eventually offered up to customers. Pivotal also has access to professional services capabilities from both VMware and EMC, as well as a data sciences group that’s focused on how to understand how organizations can get value out of their data.

But for the most part, its going to rely on a variety of partners, mostly ISVs, to either develop new applications for its platform, or to add new capabilities to their existing applications via Pivotal. And the company is betting on a lot of applications. Today, the company estimates that that these kind of next-generation cloud-based apps will grow at a 700 percent CAGR between now an 2016. However, it also stresses that today’s “second generation” applications aren’t going away, with the number of applications still growing at 70 percent CAGR between now and 2016.

While the growth will be on the side of the next-gen apps, the overall revenues numbers are still skewed towards more traditional apps, so Pivotal will be well-motivated to make sure that its platform serves the role of creating connections between the two types of applications as pain-free as possible, introducing further integration opportunities for solution providers.

As we first reported last December, the Windows 8 update due later this code named Windows Blue remains largely committed to the operating systems touchscreen-focused blocky interface, with some slight modifications. While the much beloved “Start” button that disappeared in Windows 8 may be making a comeback and “classic view” becomes a more readily available option for traditional PC users, the rest, it appears, is all tiles all the time.

Users that were hoping Microsoft might move away from the so-called Metro interface for something more like the Aero UI in XP and Win7 in upcoming versions are likely to remain disappointed with the new OS version. Windows Blue will add some basic UI functionality, including the ability to resize tiles on the PC version similar to the way Metro now works on Windows Phone 8, according to alpha testers who have worked with early versions of the software.

Microsoft also appears poised to modify Windows 8 to make it a better fit for smaller 7-inch and 8-inch tablets, giving OEMs a fighting chance against wildly popular fondleslabs like Apple Inc.’s iPad Mini and the raft of tiny tablets running Google Inc.’s Android OS.

“We are investing aggressively in retail and with OEM partners to arm the worldwide market with more touch tablets and PCs to drive adoption,” Tami Reller, CFO and CMO for Windows said in a prepared statement as part of a mini road tour to tease the Windows 8 rev. “And Windows Blue will take this approach further, which is coming later in 2013.”

Despite the reports, the issue isn’t whether Microsoft is reversing course or admitting defeat with Windows 8. They’re not. The question is, will the aggressive investment and partner enablement Reller speaks of will be too little too late to buoy a foundering Windows franchise.

Microsoft has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in the six months since the product launched, lackluster by global software standards particularly for a product like the once ubiquitous Windows OS. This year’s first quarter saw the steepest decline in PC shipments since records began, according to IDC, which pinned much of the blame on Windows 8 for slowing the market.

“Windows Blue will advance the vision we set out for Windows in the future, which started with Windows 8, and we will take into account feedback we have heard from customers using Windows 8. We will have more to share about Windows Blue – so stay tuned,” Reller said.

EMC president and COO David Goudlen

EMC Corp.’s new software-defined storage (SDS) play, ViPR, represents a major initiative by the company to manage its own storage, as well as offerings from competitive vendors, and ultimately, any generic storage.

ViPR aims to allow customers to separate data from the storage on which is housed, allowing easier management of a company’s storage resources as a vritualized pool of storage, while allowing additional services to be brought to bear on the data contained on that storage.

The idea behind ViPR is to allow service providers and enterprise to “operate a Web-scale data center yourself,” said EMC president and COO David Goulden. And because of that, the primary opportunity EMC is courting with ViPR is the service provider market, according to Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of operations and marketing. But that’s not the extent of EMC’s ambitions.

“A lot of enterprises are creating their own cloud,” Burton noted, and that’s where ViPR fits in.

EMC argues that SDS is a change necessary for the coming “third platform” for applications, which includes mobile devices, social interactions, and cloud structure. The sheer number of applications, and the number of devices accessing those devices (jumping from 83 million apps today to 500-plus million apps in 2016, by EMC’s estimation) requires moving beyond block and file storage built for transactional consistency, and basing their resiliency on hardware, and into object-based storage, with software-based resiliency, and “eventual consistency” – that is to say that it’s okay if not every possible viewer of a piece of information gets it instantly updated, as long as the master record is respected and updates get out there in a reasonable timeframe.

The SDS platform includes two elements, ViPR Controller and ViPR Data Services.

ViPR Controller will offer management and automation services for storage infrastructure, and the company says it will support EMC and rival enterprise storage systems out of the box, and will eventually include support for any generic storage hardware. Burton likened it to “a universal remote for the datacenter.”

“There are too many dedicated controls for specific devices,” Burton said. “It’s more efficient, it’s way more productive, and it’s more reliable because you tend to do things in a standard way.”

ViPR Data Services aim to speed object-based storage by allowing storage objects to be treated like files, doing away with the latency associated with object storage. It will also allow for analytics across enterprise storage infrastructure, rather than doing it on an array-by-array basis.

Goulden said that EMC consciously decided to introduce ViPR as an integrated suite, and to have it debut together in the second half of the year, to make easier to consume, a complete platform rather than a collection of point software offerings tacked into EMC’s lineup. “We could have introduced ViPR as ten different things, but we didn’t,” he said.

With ViPR, EMC is looking to do for storage what VMware did for servers. But other attempts to introduce “software defined” systems have proven challenging. While software-defined networking has been a major buzzword in networking circles over the last 18 months, many enterprises are taking a wait-and-see approach as various networking vendors introduce their competing views of what SDN really means. And VMware itself has sought to redefine itself with the new craze, calling its overall approach to datacenter virtualization “the software-defined datacenter.”

The storage giant pushes an “ecosystems” approach to the market, and although ViPR is still some time away, networking vendor Brocade has become one of the first major technology companies to sign on for the technology. Brocade announced that its Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN products will integrate with the ViPR platform. According to the companies, there are “more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers” who will be able to quickly jump on ViPR when it hits the market.

To that end, the firm launched its 600 Appliance line, aimed at nabbing viruses, spam, malicious Web sites and other security challenges stumping the SMB.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the company is touting performance as the most significant selling point — with highlighted features including 1.5 Gbps of firewall throughput and 37 SecurityPower units. To that end, the 600 Appliance line offers the same next-generation firewall and threat prevention on Check Point products used in the Fortune 100, the company says. But it also comes equipped with a slew of standard features that include firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, anti-virus, anti-spam, application control and URL filtering.

However, in order to make a stronger push into the SMB, the new appliance line is also better geared for the skills, staffing and budget associated with small organizations. As such, the appliances are easy to set up and manage, and are offered through a streamlined, intuitive user interface, along with an array of pre-defined security policies.

That bodes well for solution providers wanting to ramp up their user base quickly in order to reduce total cost of ownership and get a viable SMB business off the ground.

Meanwhile, the launch indicates that Check Point is making a more assertive push into smaller markets. And with good reason – SMB security needs are growing and becoming more complex. By numerous reports, the SMB is spending more on security, and its investments are only going to increase. According to a report issued by IDC, the SMB security spend will likely exceed $5.6 billion by 2015. And while overall SMB IT spending is estimated at a rate of 5 to 6 percent, spending on security is anticipated to grow twice as fast.

“Cyber attacks on small businesses are on the rise. It’s no longer just the larger businesses that are being attacked, but companies with a hundred employees or less are also lucrative targets, and no business sector is immune,” said Dorit Dor, Check Point vice president of products.

It’s an opportunity that’s not lost on Check Point, which has been retooling its strategy to better cater to SMB needs. Last month the firewall and security appliance firm debuted a new appliance line that took a crack at remote and small branch office markets.

Check Point also gained a stronger foothold into the SMB earlier this year with the launch of its Threat Emulation Software Blade, trumpeted as an affordable option for cash-strapped customers with a flexible, pay-as-you-go business model and array of service options.

Check Point President Amnon Bar-Lev told Channelnomics earlier this year that the company planned to make greater forays in the SMB. And its latest release seems to take it a few steps further in fulfilling that pledge.

That said, Check Point is emerging as the challenger in light of a vast sea of networking security competitors vying for the SMB space. But the company is hoping to use its enterprise prowess to its advantage by touting a lower market product with upmarket features. It’s a selling point that solution providers might increasingly rely on in light of a more treacherous threat environment that is increasingly turning its cannons on the SMB.

EMC global channel chief Gregg Ambulos

2013 will be the last year for EMC’s Velocity partner programs. Kicking off its second-ever Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas Monday morning, the storage giant announced plans to replace the various Velocity programs with a combined partner program that will brand all of the company’s partner base as EMC Business Partners.

In recent years, the storage giant has rolled out a number of partners under the Velocity brand for solution providers and service providers. It has also held separate programs for alliances, professional services, and technology partners.

Gregg Ambulos, the company’s global head of channel sales, said the change is designed to let all classes of partners more closely align themselves with the EMC brand.

“The name Velocity goes away, all of you market yourself as EMC Business Partners with all the equity and all of the clout of EMC behind you,” Ambulos said.

Along with the new name, Ambulos suggested at least one additional change was on the way. He announced that the company’s PowerLink site will be replaced by a new partner portal by a new partner portal, as well as new mobile apps for the EMC Business Partner program.

The Velocity program has been EMC’s main vehicle to connect with the channel community coming off of what Jeremy Burton, executive vice president of product operations and marketing at EMC, called “the dark days” of EMC’s tight partnership with Dell. That relationship was largely severed over a number of storage-focused acquisitions by Dell that made the two increasingly more competitors than allies, and prompted EMC to embrace the channel, whereas before it had been primarily focused on direct sales and ultimately the Dell relationship.

And Velocity has done its job – depending on whom at EMC you ask, the company either between 50 and 60 per cent of its revenues via partners. And although he declined to specify a targeted long/term balance between channel and direct sales, CEO Joe Tucci told attendees in Las Vegas that the percentage will continue to grow, and that it will continue to grow intentionally.

But the company clearly feels it’s time to bring all of its partner constituents under one roof, and to more clearly attach the company’s brand to that program.

And of course, even a unified partner program will still have some fragmentation. At the very least, in addition to EMC Business Partner, the company will have a partner program brand for VMware, and one for its VCE joint venture with Cisco.

And there may be at least one more partner program to consider in the EMC family. In response to a partner question, Tucci told attendees to keep their eyes open for a formal partner program from EMC’s latest business, the Pivotal big-data company it spun up along with VMware last month. Today, he said, all of the various parts of the Pivotal stack are available to partners through various partner programs, but Tucci acknowledge the company has to do more for its partners.

“We have great pieces, but we haven’t stitched those great pieces together for you,” Tucci told partners.

He said he expects to see that level of product integration into a Pivotal suite, as well as a partner program from the spinoff led by Paul Maritz, by the end of 2013.

Further details of the EMC Business Partner launch, and the transition from Velocity, are expected to be announced in the near future.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins

Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins believes the age of tablets will end relatively quickly. His reason: Tablets just don’t make sense.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Heins said, “In five years, I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

From the Blackberry perspective, Heins’ position makes sense. Blackberry was among the first vendors to attempt to challenge Apple’s juggernaut iPad. It developed a device of similar size and capabilities as the iPad, the deservingly maligned Playbook, which ran on Blackberry’s own operating system.

It failed miserably, much as Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad powered by WebOS crashed and burned.

The numbers are against Heins, though.

Since the iPad hit the market in 2010, more than 400 million units have sold worldwide. More than 220 models were on the market in 2012, and more are being added. And tablets are going far beyond consumer devices, as companies from Lenovo, Samsung, Panasonic and Hewlett-Packard are releasing business-class tablets. Even Microsoft has positioned its Surface Windows Pro as a business-class device.

No, the age of tablets won’t end quickly; but they will someday be superseded by a new generation of technology.

Until then, tablets are the vanquisher of conventional PCs. In fact, competition in the tablet market will only increase as more vendors release new, less expensive and increasingly capable devices. HP, for instance, released its Slate 7, a 7-inch Android powered tablet priced at just $169. While aimed at consumers, the Slate 7 – like other consumer tablets before – will undoubted find its way into the workplace.

The issue isn’t whether tablets are a good business computing devices, but rather how vendors plan to evolve mobile devices for greater business capabilities.

Lacking across the tablet universe are clear and consistent channel strategies. Tablet vendors have thus far failed to clearly articulate how they will bring their tablets and mobile devices to the channel for resale, integration and support. Many solution providers are working around the vendor vacuum, coming up with innovative models for integrating and operationalizing mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices – such as Apple iTouch – into business uses. They can make money this way, but it’s not an end-to-end channel solution.

Tablet vendors have done a fabulous job of building use cases for consumers; but it’s been consumers building the use cases for business. The introduction of new, low-cost tablets by HP, Amazon, Google and Samsung will usher in hybrid devices used for personal and professional use. There’s even talk that Microsoft and Apple will release low-cost tablets. Businesses are benefiting from the influx of personal owned devices, as they extend worker productivity and decrease IT capital costs.

The opportunity given to the channel thus far has been mobile device management, applications and services that manage smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks regardless of ownership. While it’s a burgeoning segment, it’s only the beginning. Vendors and solution providers will find far greater opportunities with mobile applications tailor made for tablets and smartphones than the actual devices themselves.

Back to Blackberry. Blackberry’s failure with the Playbook wasn’t so much due to performance and form-factor (although they were factors), but rather applications and use cases. Blackberry launched Playbook with an inadequate volume of applications and, worse, couldn’t get its ISV community engaged to develop more apps. The same problem plagued the HP TouchPad when it launched in 2011. And Microsoft has suffered from the lack of Apps for Windows Phone 7.

Does Heins have a point about the practicality of tablets? Absolutely. Tablets aren’t very good at creating content or complex tasks. Microsoft made that argument following the iPad launch; CEO Steve Ballmer derided the iPad because it was mostly good for consuming information. Two years later, Microsoft has a tablet of its own.

Ultrabooks and convertibles may be the answer to the content and productivity issues. Chances are, though, a new form factor will emerge that will change the game again. Google Glass and or the plethora of “Smart Watches” could be the beginning of truly wearable computing.

Here’s the reality: PCs aren’t going away, but they may take a backseat to new form factors. Tablets are still new and hot, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. And there will always be something new just over the horizon.

Avaya Canada channel chief Renzo DiPasquale

Avaya’s long-awaited single system for managing partner pricing and quoting finally has a due date – the networking vendor has announced that Avaya One Source will roll out globally this year, starting with EMEA and Asia Pacific by July, and ultimately arriving in North America by the end of the year.

Avaya has been pledging a unified quoting tool since the introduction of its Avaya Connect partner program, its first program that included both legacy Avaya and Nortel products and partners. And the need for a streamlined system has become even more apparent with the acquisition and integration of other companies along the way, most notably video conferencing company Radvision.

Currently, each of those groups has their own price books, catalogues and quoting tools, making it cumbersome for partners to get a quote for customer projects that involved products from multiple categories. One Source brings all of Avaya’s products under the same roof and into the same tool, and provides the framework for offering future products, or integrating the offerings of future acquisitions. In all, some 200 pricing catalogues are being consolidated into One Source.

“It’s going to simplify and streamline the ordering process,” said Avaya Canada channel chief Renzo DiPasquale. On average, he said, partners who’ve had early access to the tool have seen the time to produce a quote reduced by about 50 percent.

With the move to OneSource, the company is also tackling the complexity of figuring out partner discounts on its gear. Currently, the company has upwards of 1,400 material price groups into which its products fall for discounting. With the launch of One Source, the company is bringing that down to 13 distinct categories by consolidating the pricing groups into larger overall categories, including networking, wireless, and contact center.

One Source allow introduces the ability for partners to share the quotes they generate with distributors via the Web, and allows for access to quotes and ordering without the need for partners to connect via VPN.

The networking vendor also announced plans to introduce a series of bundles that bring together frequently combined unified communications functions and makes them available on a pay-per-user model via the channel. The company will introduce three new Avaya Unified Communications Suites: Foundation, which covers SIP, telephony, instant messaging and desktop video; Mobility, which adds single number access, BYOD features and secure remote access; and Collaboration, which bundles a the breadth of Avaya’s communications and collaboration offerings. Foundation and Mobility Suites are available now, with Collaboration set to debut next month.

DiPasquale said the packages use the typical bundling tactics of offering more bang for the customer’s buck adding features that would be separately more than the combined cost of the bundle. The suites are also easier for solution providers to get access to – they can be ordered as a single SKU from distribution.

Like One Source, the Suites fall under the category of making it easier to do business, DiPasquale suggested.

“Any time we can streamline the process, that leads to a more satisfied customer, a happier partner, and more revenue and more margin for everyone,” he said.

EMC CEO Joe Tucci

LAS  VEGAS – EMC kicks off its annual EMC World conference Monday at the Venetian here, and up first on the agenda is the general session for its partner community.

Last year was the first time the storage giant held a Global Partner Summit in concert with its larger end user event, and used the opportunity to highlight new rules of engagement that more clearly delineated the interactions between EMC’s own sales force and that of its partners.

So what’s on the agenda for EMC and its Velocity partner program at this year’s event? Join me after the jump to find out. The liveblog should start updating at around 8:30 am Pacific, 11:30 am Eastern Monday morning.